NEW DELHI:With many election surveys giving a majority to the AAP, with the BJP finishing second, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday questioned the authenticity of “these pollsters” and urged the people of the national capital not to be influenced by such surveys.
“These (surveys) are just lies. Even when I contested from Varanasi to the Lok Sabha, they (surveys) said Modi will lose by three lakh votes. I don’t know who these pollsters are,” Modi said, while addressing a huge gathering at Ambedkar Nagar.
He mocked AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal saying that he was wondering “how someone who could not win his own Lok Sabha seat was being projected as someone big”.
It was Modi’s fourth and last rally for the Delhi elections. He chose Ambedkar Nagar, home to the capital’s poor and Dalit sections, to make a strong pitch for the BJP’s Chief Ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi.
The Dalit voters, who were the traditional vote bank of the Congress, had shifted their allegiance en masse to the AAP during the 2013 Assembly elections.
“The size of crowd which I am seeing today is more than what I saw during the Lok Sabha elections,” he said.
“A few friends asked me whether I have also given donation to the AAP and when I got it checked, I was surprised to know that even Mahatma Gandhi and (US President Barack) Obama have donated to them,” he said, mocking AAP’s funding row.
The PM also talked about the various welfare schemes started by his government to help the poor saying that his politics was all about development without which no state can progress.
“My politics has only one style, only one mantra and only one focus and that is development. And it means that there should be change in the lives of the poor people. Their children should get education, their parents should get medicine. And there should be concrete house in place of slum clusters,” he said.
As the elections appear to be headed towards a very close fight, Modi hastened to ‘clarify’ a blooper in the party’s Vision Document.
The BJP Vision Document, released on Tuesday, had “inadvertently” described the capital’s denizens hailing from the NorthEast as “immigrants”.
Though, the NorthEasterners are a miniscule presence in Delhi, the Prime Minister took pains to assuage their feelings. He said that his party has accepted its mistake and assured them that the NE region would see more progress under him than what it had witnessed in the last 60 years.
He targeted the AAP and the Congress for trying to undermine the unity of the country. “I can see that attempts are being made to incite our brothers and sisters from North-East for the last two days. The party (the BJP) has used the word (immigrant) was wrong. The party has accepted its mistake. There should not be an attempt to harm the unity of this country,” he said.
“While youth from the NorthEast states were fleeing Bengaluru in 2012 due to some rumours against them, the then BJP-ruled Karnataka government’s Home Minister had gone there to convince them to return,” the PM claimed.
“Elections will come and go, but there should be no crack in national harmony,” he said. Countering the AAP allegations against the BJP-NDA Government on the issue of LPG subsidy, he said his government is giving direct benefit transfer(DBT) for LPG subsidy. He also lashed out at the Congress saying that his was neither a “ghotala sarkar (government of scam)” nor a government run with the help of “ghotalebaaz (scamsters).”